Ben Shapiro, arch conservative
author of Porn Generation:
How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future,
is up in arms
about an ad campaign by
the American Humanist Association (AHA) in Washington D.C. Signs on
buses say “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” Shapiro
thinks that without god we're doomed:

...without God, there can be no moral choice. Without God, there is no
capacity for free will. That’s because a Godless world is a soulless
world. Virtually all faiths hold that God endows human beings with the
unique ability to choose their actions -- the ability to transcend
biology and environment in order to do good. Transcending biology and
our environment requires a higher power -- a spark of the supernatural.

He goes on
to draw out the perilous consequences of being without supernatural souls:
no freedom, no responsibility, moral and legal chaos, the end of equality
and the advent of totalitarianism. Not a pretty picture. To avoid a social
meltdown we have to stick with theism:

...as
a system of thought, atheism cannot be the basis for any functional
state. If we wish to protect freedom and equality, we must understand
the value of recognizing God. We must recognize the flame of divinity --
free will -- He implanted within each of us.

Many
folks, theistic or not, might agree with Shapiro that without a freedom that
transcends biology and environment we're sunk. But Shapiro doesn't see (or
see fit to mention) that there are viable
naturalistic alternatives
to supernatural free will which ground responsibility, equality, political
and personal freedom and the whole nine yards of Western civilization. Once
people understand this, then we needn't propagate the fiction that we are
moral levitators to avoid mass
demoralization. This is why it would be helpful if the AHA and other
naturalist organizations were to address worries about the soul and free
will as they do worries about god. We don't need the "flame of divinity"
within us to secure any human good, any more than we need divinity itself.

__________________________

Even Killers Don't Deserve to Die(letter appearing in the
Boston Globe)

To the Editors:

Thanks to the Globe for pointing
out good reasons to oppose the death penalty (“Cruel
and more unusual,” Editorial, Dec. 28). Left unmentioned, however, was
any argument against a common justification for execution: murderers deserve
to die because they freely choose to kill. Were we to take a fully
scientific, cause and effect view of the genesis of a killer’s character,
motives, state of mind, and situation, we would no longer suppose that he
could have done otherwise given his genetic and environmental history and
his current circumstances, internal and external.
This view doesn’t diminish the
moral gravity of the offense or the necessity to protect society, but it
calls into question the free will justification for retributive punishment.
As psychologists
Joshua Greene (Harvard) and
Jonathan Cohen (Princeton) conclude
in their 2004 paper “For
the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything,”
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London:
“Free
will as we ordinarily understand it is an illusion generated by our
cognitive architecture. Retributivist notions of criminal responsibility
ultimately depend on this illusion…”
Give up the illusion, and we’ve
got another good reason to oppose the death penalty: killers don’t deserve
to die.

- Thomas W. Clark, Director, Center for Naturalism

Follow-up: See
here for some online commentary from readers, which not surprisingly
runs the gamut from ridicule to incredulity, but also includes welcome
minority support from some friendly naturalists.

The prestige of science is such that everyone
wants it on their side. Science is a trusted arbiter of facts for most of
us, at least when it comes to empirical questions on which evidence can be
brought to bear. So it’s little wonder that even those with patently
faith-based convictions about the nature of things should try to conscript
it to their advantage. The obvious examples are creationists and advocates
of intelligent design who argue that were it properly conducted,
science would provide support for their supernatural hypotheses (see
here). The argument thus becomes about the nature of science itself:
does it have canonical methods and assumptions? What are these, and are
certain scientists guilty of letting their worldview warp good scientific
practice? If science as it’s commonly conducted doesn’t support your
metaphysics, then the temptation might be to claim that mainstream
scientists are guilty of malfeasance.

The intelligent design controversy is perhaps the
biggest front on the science wars, followed by disputes over the paranormal,
but a new front is opening up around the issue of materialism or
physicalism. Is science biased in favor of the materialist-physicalist
assumption, the idea that nature fundamentally contains only material
things? A small but vocal group of self-styled anti-materialist and dualist
neuroscientists held a mind-body
symposium at the UN last year, arguing that science has indeed been
hijacked by dogmatic materialists, who wrongly discount evidence for
categorically non-physical phenomena. New Scientist ran a good
article about it, quoting some well-respected mainstream scientists and
philosophers who, unsurprisingly, see the anti-materialists as the
dogmatists, intent on warping science to serve their agenda.

Psychology Today hosts a wide variety of
blogs written by psychologists, therapists, philosophers and other assorted
professionals concerned with mind, body and behavior. New on the block is
One Among
Many by Brown University social psychologist Joachim I. Krueger, who
posted recently on "Troubles
with determinism." As the title suggests, he worries that a consistently
determinist view of ourselves might undercut our sense of agency and
self-efficacy. As he puts it,

The problem of determinism is a deep one, and
I think that neither scientific nor folk psychology have come to grips
with it. In scientific psychology, there is constant friction between
deterministic theories, such as behaviorism (or any other theory
describing "mechanisms") and theories stressing human agency. What
academic psychology seems to be telling us is that human behavior
follows scientifically detectable laws and that at the same time we have
the power to choose and change apart from these laws.

It's crucial to see
that determinism doesn't conflict with genuine human agency, including the
power to change ourselves. Human beings, though caused in each and every
respect, are just as real as the causes that shaped them, and they
still have real causal powers to pursue their goals, including those set by
psychotherapy. We can't logically attribute causal power to the factors that
create human agents and yet deny it for the agents themselves
(see Avoiding
demoralization by determinism).

Naturalism: The Next
Step for Humanists?- online video presentation about naturalism for
the Freethought Association of Western Michigan; works as a spoken
introduction to the philosophy and its implications.

Applied
Naturalism Group - a forum to explore the personal and
social applications of naturalism; membership by application.

Naturalism
Philosophy Forum - to facilitate the
investigation of scientific naturalism, its assumptions, structure, and
logical implications; open membership.

Feedback. Your suggestions about the form and
content of this newsletter are most welcome. Want to contribute?
Complain? Correct? Unsubscribe? Don't be shy -
write today.

Support. The Center for Naturalism is on the
front lines of progressive cultural change, promoting an explicit, thorough-going naturalism as a viable
alternative to dualist worldviews. Please consider making a
donation to
support our work. We are a 501c3 non-profit, so your
contributions are tax-deductible. And visit our
online store for a practical gift
that supports the propagation of naturalism.

Subscribe
to the low impact newsletter and CFN events notification - newsletter appears
approximately every two
months, events announced at occasional intervals not to exceed twice a month.